The Jewish Woman Who Was the Love of Palestine’s Most Famous Poet Died This Week

“Rita is an erotic poem. … Rita in all my poems is a Jewish woman.” – Mahmoud Darwish, in a 1996 interview with Israeli literary critic Helit Yeshurun.

On Feb. 24, Tamar Ben-Ami, a Jewish-Israeli woman who inspired some of Mahmoud Darwish’s most famous poems, died at 79. She was an acclaimed choreographer but would have lived an otherwise anonymous life if not for the fact that Darwish, who is often described as Palestine’s national poet, acknowledged in late-life interviews that the “Rita” in poems of his like “Rita and the Rifle” and “Rita’s Winter” was an Israeli woman named Tamar Ben-Ami, whom he had loved.

Ben-Ami describes their meeting in the 2014 documentary film “Write Down, I Am an Arab,” so titled for the first line of Darwish’s renowned 1964 poem, “Identity Card.” She was 16 and he was 22 years old. Their attraction was romantic rather than political, though both were active in the Israeli Communist Party. But their political reality was impossible to shut out.

Ibtisam Mara’ana, the Palestinian-Israeli documentary filmmaker who made “Write Down, I Am an Arab,” spoke movingly about Ben-Ami on an Israeli radio program on Feb. 25, the day after she died. Ben-Ami had been interviewed on the same program just three months earlier. Both women offered commentary that was terribly sad and profoundly humanizing.

Ben-Ami said that she was deeply struck by the synchronicity of her illness and “the terrible events” in Israel-Palestine. She was diagnosed with bone cancer on Oct. 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel, which led to the Gaza war. “I lived very much between the national and the personal. I started my life with an Arab and I am ending it with a German,” she said, referring to Darwish and to the man who was her life partner. “And they are both angels.”

Mara’ana, who is married to a Jewish man, is audibly moved as she thanks the host for dedicating part of his program to the story of a romantic relationship between a Palestinian and a Jew, noting that this is not something one can take for granted in contemporary Israeli society.

In the film “Write Down, I Am an Arab,” Ben-Ami reveals for the first time a collection of love letters Darwish wrote to her 45 years earlier. Composed in Hebrew that is fluent and elegant but formal, the letters are passionately romantic.

I swim in the light of your eyes. I lean on your shoulder, eat with you, and press your hand which lies like a bird in my hand, who has no desire to fly away. Where would it fly to? From me … to you.

Ben-Ami ended their relationship in 1967. The extreme taboo on an Arab-Jewish romance was too much for the young woman. In the film she says, painfully, that she blamed herself, that she had not been strong enough to “face the hardship” of being in a relationship with an Arab man.

Darwish went into exile in 1970, after he had twice been imprisoned under Israel’s martial law, which was imposed on its Arab citizens until 1966. Ben-Ami visited him in Paris in the 1990s, at his invitation, after she defended him on Israeli television against the outcry over “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words,” a poem he wrote in anger in 1987, during the First Intifada. By then Darwish had rock star status. But in Paris he rebuffed her, saying, “So many years have passed.” Time, politics and life had effected a role reversal: Now he was the pragmatist and she was the romantic.

In a 2014 interview with Haaretz, Ben-Ami cited Darwish as a profound influence on her creativity. He had taught her, she said, “to be precise in using words” and to describe experiences “in images and metaphors.” She added, “My story with Mahmoud is also a symbol of the Israeli-Palestinian story.” She attended his 2008 memorial service in Ramallah, laying flowers on his gravestone.